Social Media

If you’ve been in the world of social media marketing within the past five years, there’s no doubt you’ve noticed that most platforms have been shifting toward a pay-to-play model.
Whether it’s Facebook’s shrinking organic engagement or Instagram switching away from a chronological feed, the days of scaling organic social media engagement for free are going away.
Aside from your engagement numbers going down, another area that has been impacted is social media budgets.
In Q1 of 2017, social media ad spend increased 60% YOY.
Whether it’s due to the decreased organic visibility or the general growth in social media marketing, it’s clear that brands are getting more serious with how they budget for social media.
As a result, a lot of marketers and br...

833468Senior Social Strategy Consultant Brooke Andersen and I recently appeared on a webinar about targeting your audience effectively on Instagram.
A huge portion of the webinar focused on setting a strong foundation by building out social marketing personas for your brand. If you missed it, here’s the step-by-step process—along with the webinar recording at the bottom.
Step 1: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Start with your larger marketing personas. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Begin this process by identifying and learning about the personas (customer types) which your whole marketing team goes after today.
Don’t have marketing personas? Skip to step 2 below.
Step 2: Start Listening
Using a Listening solution is the quickest and easiest way to both identif

Has your brand seen positive returns on Instagram? Is your Instagram following big enough to drive profitable traffic to your landing pages?
If you’re hesitating to answer, it might be time to learn how to get followers on Instagram. The larger your audience grows, the more opportunities you have to engage with users and create unique experiences for them.
But sometimes brands take the easy way out when trying to get more Instagram followers. Pay for likes and follower sites are everywhere, but we’ll be the first to tell you organically building an audience will drive much better results.
Did you know that roughly 48 million Instagram users are fake? This means no matter how many Instagram followers you have, if they’re fake, they’re not going to your landing page,...

Facebook is a preferred social network by marketers, not only because of the sheer number of users represented but also because of its incredibly insightful analytics suite. It’s important to be able to analyze customers and their behavior on a micro level due to Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm, and the implications for your content and business. If you refuse to adapt your approach based on these insights, you’re doomed to obscurity on the news feed.
A deep Facebook analysis shouldn’t be a one and done situation. Ideally, you’ll be auditing your efforts every few months or so at most. But don’t feel guilty if this hasn’t been a part of your social media strategy so far—there’s no time like the present to start a new habit.
Sprout f...

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles of social media for brands is the pressure to “keep up.”
Platforms come and go. User behavior changes. As a result, the way brands approach social media has to change too. Heck, looking at a guide on how to “dominate” Facebook from 2010 feels like reading hieroglyphics today.
Rewind back to as recently as 2017. Consider how much the social landscape has already evolved.
Drastic shifts in Facebook algorithm
The introduction of Twitter’s 280-character limit
The rise of LinkedIn for influencer outreach
The explosion of live video via Facebook and Instagram
And honestly, that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
So, what social media tactics should be cornerstones of your strategy in 2018 to remain relevant?
We’ve broke...

If you’re a brand, you want eyes on your product or service–and more importantly, you want people to come back. To stand out in the crowd, your brand might’ve adopted Instagram. However, does your audience consider you one of their favorite Instagram accounts to follow?
Being a network based on visual entertainment creates endless possibilities to showcase your brand, company voice or design talent. Here at Sprout Social, we take pride in our design and visual aesthetic, which we transcribe into our social media analytics and reporting features.
Having visually appealing tools and reporting can make social media management simply more manageable.
But as many designers and social media managers will tell you, they get a lot of inspiration from the people and brands doin...

Is your business working toward better brand awareness? Are you doing everything possible to grow and influence your audience on social media? If so, it’s critical to know the difference between reach vs impressions.
Marketers commonly encounter these two terms, but not everyone knows and understands what makes each metric so important. Many understand the importance of social media engagement. However, when it comes to strategy, it’s all about accurately measuring your metrics and finding areas to increase efforts.
Various social media terms are often misinterpreted and some are even thought to mean the same thing. While it’s very easy to group terms like reach and impressions together, they do have their own definitions. Before you accurately measure these metrics, let...

What began as a way for college students to connect has grown into one of the world’s largest social networks. In turn, it has become one of the best marketing resources too. But in order to be successful on Facebook, you have to dig below the surface and familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the platform and analytics.
Here are some important Facebook stats—broken down by multiple dimensions—to help guide your social media strategy. Click on the jump links below to skip to each section:
General Facebook stats
Facebook demographic stats
Facebook geo stats
Facebook usage stats
Facebook mobile stats
Facebook video stats
Facebook advertising stats
Facebook publishing stats
General Facebook Stats
First, let’s start off with some general Facebook stats to paint ...

About Me

Bella Sanderson

Bella Sanderson British born, American by choice.
She worked as journalist in Asia for 15 years, was a NBC Radio Correspondent for Nepal and BBC stringer in HK. In HK, Sanderson studied acupuncture and Chinese medicine with Chinese healer Dr But Chak-kei and tai chi with Martial Arts Master Ha kwok-cheung.